It was
once the fashion to single out four men of letters as the supreme titans of
world literature – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe – each the embodiment of a
great epoch of Western culture – ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern. These
four literary icons of all times remain secure, but idolatry of Professor Wole
Soyinka as the prototype of the inquiring spirit and courageous intellect of
modern man has been sharply appreciated in our time, especially as we pass
beyond the more leisurely issues of the post modernist era.
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| *Wole Soyinka |
The intensely contemporary character of his works has made him
the tallest iroko tree in the post-modernist forest of global dramatic
literature. Yet, the commencement, two weeks ago, of the Wole Soyinka 85th
Birthday Festival, which ultimately climaxed on July 13, his date of birth,
unfortunately doesn't seem to wear the official insignia of the Nigerian
government especially because he has started telling them the truth about the
Nigerian condition. But, it is expected, as Christ Himself says in Matthew
13:57, "A prophet is not without honour, save his own country and his own
house."
In
retrospect, in March 1996 when the Nigerian artistic and literary community was
agog with the explosion of a series of events to mark the tri-centenary and two
score anniversary of the birth of Von Goethe (1749-1832), the German creative
genius and great thinker of all times, the Sani Abacha-led military junta,
despite its sadistic, base and tyrannical complexion, surpassingly accorded the
celebration an official recognition while declaring Soyinka, the custodian of
our artistic signature wanted, dead or alive.
Given the authoritarian intolerance of the Buhari government and
the President's implacable disdain for anything cerebral, no one actually
expected less from them especially at a time when Soyinka has suddenly found
his lost voice and is telling him to listen to the cries of the Igbo and the
minorities in the country, and to heed to the call for the restructuring of
this lopsided federation. Oscar Wilde, the great Victorian English
epigrammatist, in a state of protracted gloom once observed that:
"Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to
vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap
editions of great men are absolutely detestable." Indeed, the brilliant
Wilde cannot be faulted. But there is no more breeding ground for such critical
vituperation than our current socio-political climate.
We hear
that in top government circles they are no more comfortable with Kongi due to
his recent critical observatories on the state of the nation. Yet, if that is
the price Soyinka would pay for being what he is, that price could seem high to
those who swam into his ken, for he is still our leading intellectual lion and
is alive to his responsibilities. Artists are hardly into lasting friendships
with the State.
Edmund Wilson, in his famous essay, "The Wound and the Bow",
takes Sophocles' play, Philoctetes as an allegory of the artist:
Philoctetes was marooned on an island because he suffered from an evil-smelling
wound. Yet fellow Greeks sought him out because they needed his magic bow for
the Trojan war. The artist pays for his creative vision by his sickness, and though
society rejects him, it nevertheless needs him because of the healing power of
his art. This view does not derive inevitably from modern psychology, and
social at least as much as psychological factors account for its rise and
popularity. For instance, having chastised and imprisoned Soyinka for being a
stubborn radical, the Federal Government of Nigeria, in 1986, awarded him the
second highest national honour of the land, thus making him the celebrated
prodigal son of that era. The Nigerian leadership was shamefully beaten to
submission because Soyinka had won the prestigious Nobel Prize in literature in
1986.
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| Professor Wole Soyinka and President Buhari |
There may
be scarcity of heroes in Nigeria, or there may be a lack of official
acknowledgment of the existence of one, but in Prof. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian
people are blessed with one. In 1840, when he was at the height of his fame,
Thomas Carlyle, who influenced the thinking of his time more than any other
great Victorian writer, delivered six popular lectures "On Heroes, Hero
Worship and the Heroic in History". Amongst the different categories of
heroes whom Carlyle discussed, including great religious and military leaders,
lectures were devoted to: "The Hero
As Poet (Dante and Shakespeare) and to "The
Hero As Man Of Letters (Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, and Robert Burns). Elements of all of these heroes are in Soyinka.
For in him, there is a direct
immersion of the writer and his art as we find his life exemplifying his
literature and vice-versa. Soyinka is an indomitable social activist and committed
crusader, and no other Nigerian writer, except, perhaps, Ken Saro-Wiwa, has
suffered more deprivation, humiliation and personal physical and psychological
discomfort from the hands of State apparatuses and state superstructures for
his beliefs than Soyinka. The betrayal of the national trust by Nigerian
politicians and the general apathy of the citizenry provoked a civil war in
Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. In fact, the traumatic effects of the social
upheaval of the mid 1960's, the war and its attendant horrors orchestrated
Soyinka's political commitment.
Soyinka
consequently emerged as the flag bearer of a generation of disinterested angry
Nigerian writers with a total commitment to the radical transformation of a
society caught in the unholy and rapacious embrace of a neo-imperialist and
neo-colonialist social order, whose works not only represent and protest, but
also uncompromisingly undermine alienation in all ramifications. Without going
into specifics, the totality of Soyinka's works does not only remorselessly lay
bare the laws on which this alienating social order is based, with their
historical and artificial character, it also offers a ruthless critique and
demystification of the originality of the existing stultifying social order
encapsulated in a powerful artistic imagery, and of a viable alternative
hegemony.
History
is replete with the fact that writers over time have been the builders of the
thoughts and characters of their ages. For, even in Europe, unprejudiced
inquiry in the bold, unshackled tradition began with Descartes, Spinoza and
Locke in the seventeenth century – the three great thinkers and writers who laid
the foundation for the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment, as the eighteenth
century was to be called.
At the end of this period, Rousseau and Adam Smith
came even closer to defining the ideas that have shaped modern political and
economic thought and life till date. In the later sixteenth century, Spain was
the greatest power in Europe; in the seventh century France held this position,
and in the eighteenth England. All this was made possible by their men of
letters. Indeed, the stage of history during the Age of Reason belongs
primarily to France and England, who fought each other continually for
colonies, trade and political power but collaborated intellectually to achieve
the Enlightenment and the classical ideals of arts and literature.
Unarguably,
the sharp decline in Spain was nearly complete by 1650; the rise of Prussia was
still in progress in 1770. The Italian States had settled into an elegant
decadence long before. Sweden had brief hey days of conquest in the early
eighteenth century, and the Netherlands challenged France and England for
colonies and trade in the high seas; but both were countries too small to rival
the great powers for long. Only Austria in the East ranked with the two giants
of the West, but she was an old-styled empire compounded by many people;
insular and self-contained but lacking modern nationalism. She assumed
leadership in the world of music with Haydn and Mozart, but contributed little
to the literature of the age. France developed the classical ideal of literary
art, and England joined her in expressing it. It was, indeed, an era of broad
intellectual cooperation, when the national traits of Renaissance literature
gave way to cosmopolitan standards and international molds. Africa at this time
was unknown except in the brutality and savagery of Euro-American slave
drivers.
It was Wole Soyinka who wrote Africa in black and white in the
literary and intellectual map of the world when he became the first black man
to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 thereby taking over from
Christopher Mallowe after William Shakespeare in the world of drama.
Now, it
is safer to assess the greatness of historical eras when you think of the
Greece of Aeschylus, the England of Shakespeare and the Africa of Soyinka.
Quick-witted and utterly intellectually ruthless, one of Soyinka's chief and
just glories is that, for more than sixty years, he has clearly seen, and kept
constantly and conspicuously in his own sight and that of his readers the
profoundly important crises in the midst of which we are living. The moral and
social dissolution in progress about us as a nation, and the enormous peril of
sailing blindfold and haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have
always been fully visible to him.
As Soyinka turns 85, it is to be noted that the Nigerian
literary prophets are without honour in their country. Theirs are voices crying
in the wilderness of a soulless age that has refused to heed their message. But
a civilisation is doomed which has refused to give heed to the counsel of its
prophets. Why is Soyinka still very angry at 85 years? He is still angry at
this age because he believes that justice is the first condition of humanity,
yet he sees injustice walking in its true nakedness everywhere in his country.
This makes his works and speeches sweeter than ever before. It is this literal
wholesomeness of art which makes it at once charming and venerable.
Happy birthday, Prof. Kongi. The Lion will surely find his lost
Jewel some day.
*Amor is an
Abuja-based journalist and literary critic.
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